PPC Strategy Guide

PPC Strategy Guide

Introduction

There is an old saying in advertising and marketing:

“Half of your marketing is working – the only problem is, we don’t know which half.”

Have a think about the advertising you do currently. How much of this do you know is working? How much of the money you spend on brochures and sales and marketing do you actually know delivers a return?

Digital marketing tools like Google AdWords and Google Analytics can give you these answers. You can measure how much you pay and what actions users take when they visit your website. You can accurately determine if your digital marketing spend is delivering the goods and at what cost.

Unfortunately, whilst digital marketing provides these tools, most advertisers still find themselves in a situation where they don’t know what is working. The ubiquity of search engines in our modern lives has led advertisers to skip straight past considerations for strategy, planning, and measurement and dive straight into tactical marketing efforts like Pay-Per-Click and SEO, where they are as equally unsure if their efforts are delivering a meaningful return for their business.

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Strategy, Planning & Measurement

Fortunately, there is a better way. Smart targeted advertising and measurement start with strategy and planning. Likewise, this is best undertaken on a platform like Google AdWords where you can start quickly and ably measure your results through integration with Google Analytics.

Google AdWords allows you to display targeted advertising across Google’s search engines but also across related search sites such as YouTube and Google Maps. You can reach further still with the Google Display network and show adverts on a wide range of content sites like The Independent, eBay, and many, many others across all content categories.

In this guide, we will outline a model for successful online advertising. We will outline how you can develop a framework that clearly considers business objectives, goals, and audience for the campaign.

Ready? Let’s dive in!

The document breaks down into the following sections:

PPC Marketing Model

Successful online advertising requires ongoing work and optimisation to improve performance and results. Maximising output and reducing input is critical. You must clearly outline the business objectives, goals, and audiences for each campaign. This chapter outlines our PPC model which considers objectives, goals, audience, and targeting to ensure your PPC is based on a solid strategy with clear measures in place to analyse and improve as you go.

We must clearly identify our objectives for the campaign and tie the campaign objectives to business objectives. Your objectives could include raising awareness, increasing engagement, generating conversions, and customer retention. Your objectives will need to be tailored to your specific business and you will want to map your objectives to a typical marketing funnel. This chapter highlights how to identify your objectives to measure success.

This chapter discusses how to establish goals to measure the success of our campaign. These should be directly tied to the stated objectives, as well as being measureable and achievable. It is important to track as many actions, goals, and engagement data as possible. This is what really drives understanding and insight from your analytics data and will allow you to assess which campaigns are delivering the goods.

Before we can create our campaign we must clearly understand our target audience. This will help develop the campaign structure and inform the way you create the campaign. The key to successful advertising is truly understanding the wants and needs of your customers. To understand our audience we can ask Who? What? Where? When? Why? This chapter discusses how to understand your audience and build a campaign around their wants and needs.

With a clear understanding of our objectives and audience, we can now determine how we want to target our prospects across the AdWords network. There are multiple targeting options available, from location to demographics and display ads to video ads. The trick is to tailor your adverts to deliver the best results based on how your users browse the web. This chapter provides you with the primary elements required to accurately target your campaign.

This chapter will discuss how to best structure your campaign within Google AdWords. These basic building blocks are campaigns and ad groups contained within those campaigns. How you structure this will depend upon your business and marketing and the main takeaway here is that there is no single way to structure a campaign. Just be mindful of what matters when it comes to advertising and measuring the results of your campaign.

The benefit of clearly describing a strategy for your PPC campaign is that it can inform the creative, particularly when it comes to building PPC adverts with our various elements: header, ad copy, ad extensions – where does everything go? Great advertising is built on great creative, so spend as much time crafting solid messages as you do on the strategic elements of the campaign. This chapter looks at how you can craft the best ad creative to communicate your message.

It’s critically important to ensure you are collecting good data, and to do this you must correctly configure Google Analytics and Google AdWords to share data. It is important that this is customised to your reporting needs and individual objectives as you can then use that data to optimise your campaigns. This chapter outlines how to measure your campaign to enhance your PPC strategy.

Once your campaign is established you must review the analytics data and look for ways to optimise the campaign. Setting clear goals and measurements are absolutely critical to allow the campaign to be reviewed against each stated goal, in which you will consider ad performance, keyword performance, ad placement performance, campaign structure, and campaign targeting. This chapter highlights how to analyse and optimise your PPC campaign for success.

The purpose of this guide is to provide a simple, actionable approach to building strategic PPC campaigns. Much of this is common sense and our goal with this guide is to lay out a strategic and procedural process allowing you to research and implement PPC campaigns that deliver the goods. In this chapter we teach you everything you need to know about putting your PPC strategy into action to begin converting browsers into buyers.